| Director | Jithin K Jose |
|---|---|
| Box office | ₹83 crore |
The film opens in 2005 Nagercoil. We are introduced to a middle aged man, who is a father of 2 kids. He takes his mistress to a hotel and kills her when she brings up the topic of marrying her after divorcing his current wife.
Movie shifts to 2012 Trivandrum, where Sub-Inspector Jayakrishnan investigates what initially appears to be a routine case of local unrest following the elopement of a young woman. As the inquiry deepens, Jayakrishnan begins noticing inconsistencies that suggest the incident is only a surface-level distraction. His team uncovers a long-running pattern of missing women across rural areas—divorced, widowed, or unmarried—each last seen with the same unidentified man. Further analysis reveals a disturbing alternation pattern: whenever a murder occurs in Kerala, the next takes place in rural Nagercoil. In between the investigations, we see scenes of the same middle aged man befriending the "missing" women on public buses, using them for sex, and killing them off in various ways, mainly by giving them cyanide laced pills under the pretext of preventing a possible pregnancy.
The investigation reveals that each victim's phone is used to lure the next, forming a continuous chain. To strengthen the probe near the inter-state region, the team brings in a Tamil police officer (who is fluent in Malayalam) posted at the closest jurisdiction near the Trivandrum–Tamil Nadu border—Stanley Das, who in fact is the actual killer. Stanley starts working with Jayakrishnan.
Despite trying multiple tactics to trap the killer, the team repeatedly fails, since Stanley knows Jayakrishnan's next step. Suspicion briefly falls on a fellow constable, Mani, when a victim's phone is discovered hidden in his bedroom, leading the team to believe they may finally have the culprit. Jayakrishnan tracks down Divya, one of Stanley's victims who managed to stay alive because she did not consume the cyanide laced pills. She looks at Mani's photo and says he is not her lover, much to Jayakrishnan's disappointment. Meanwhile, Stanley finds out about this, kills Mani and threatens Divya not to cooperate with the police.
Jayakrishnan then interrogates a bus conductor working in the route Divya used to take. The driver recalls seeing a man repeatedly traveling with Divya, and explains his facial features to a police sketch artist. Stanley hears about this and rushes to the spot afraid that the bus driver will expose him, but the sketch is of someone different.
Stanley attempts to kill his next victim, Shiny, by taking her to a lodge at Kottayam. Suspecting scrutiny from the cashier, he steps out under the pretext of smoking and unexpectedly encounters Jayakrishnan at the main counter. Jayakrishnan hands him a paper supposedly containing the suspect's sketch and Stanley is shocked to see his face in the sketch. We see a flashback of Divya and the bus driver actually recalling Stanley's face correctly, but Jayakrishnan hides that from Stanley. Knowing he is exposed, Stanley tries to kill Jayakrishnan, ending with Jayakrishnan overpowering Stanley and smashes his head on the floor and placing his presumably dead body into the trunk of his car. The film closes with the car driving away, only for the trunk to begin opening from the inside, indicating that Stanley is alive.